I have an app that I released a couple years ago (plus another legacy app that I maintain for one of my company’s clients). My game has a long-ish title, but it was fine until some asshat at Google decides that 33 characters is too long. On top of that, every time I’m forced to update the target SDK, I need to spend several hours figuring out a bunch of new build errors. This is not how I wanted to spend my vacation time.
Okay I’m siding with OP here. Google is dogshit when it comes to compatibility. When I was coding for GCP I counted how many breaking changes they rolled out and it totaled about 2 a month, I spent on average 4 days a month (almost a full working week) just upgrading Google’s bullshit API changes.
Now, I’m all for upgrading stuff and keeping things ready to go, but there’s a cadence to that. Most companies will treat downstream developers well, things like security updates are mandatory but rarely include breaking changes, new features may have breaking changes but they’re optional (for a year or maybe even 2, to give you time to upgrade your app).
Google just throws that all out the window and quite literally sends out messaging like "You need to drop everything you’re working on and upgrade to this <> because <> for <>.
I have successfully prevented 2 companies from going over to GCP based on this. They’re too fickle, they see a shiny new feature and want to cram it in but don’t care about anything that was made over 3 months ago. Avoid developing on Google products.
I can’t speak for GCP as I’ve never used it, and as much as I love to jump on the Google hate train (they really do suck in so many ways), I am an Android app developer who also has to deal with the target API upgrades and they’re usually not terrible. Most of the time, just a single line change, build, and push.
But most of my apps don’t do any sort of tracking or access the file system, so outside of the whole permissions change a few years back, these have been easy to do.
The name truncation thing here is silly, though. Very annoying.
I say all this to say that I do think Google is doing a good thing here. In this one regard. I can’t stress enough how specific I’m being with my praise here.
That’s fair, I’m not an app developer so I don’t know that side of the house. Cloud and live services I hated, so much churn.